Is Greenwashing the New Money Laundering?

Not exactly. It’s not new. And it’s a lot bigger.

The trillions involved are likely to dwarf the entire history of money laundering. Dig into the numbers below.

But lets look on the bright sunny core of greenwashing. Unlike money laundering this is not aiding and abetting criminals. On the contrary. It’s keeping legal businesses alive. Think of all the dependent employees and pensioners.

Also greenwashing is excellent for GDP – think of all the otherwise starving families of advertisers, artists, analysts, copywriters, lawyers, lobbyists and media professionals.

Finally, greenwashing truly is beyond petroleum, profit and GDP. It’s about well-being. Scientific research has shown greenwashing systematically and reliably reduces investors’ anxieties.

Just follow the money…

articles below + updates now here

green finance, investment – ESG, greenwashing

updates here

greenwashing/green finance/ESG – articles up to 7-2021 below – later updates here

moneyweek.com 7-2021 Playing pass the parcel with toxic assets won’t save the environment– Wanting to do the right thing, big oil companies are divesting themselves of toxic fossil-fuel assets. But we still need oil – and they’re the best people to produce it. by John Stepek

“One thing that globalisation enabled the developed world to do was to dump a great deal of its “dirtiest” business in developing world countries. From factories to coal consumption to “recycling” (sometimes a euphemism for “landfill, but in a poor country”), we swept all the mucky stuff out of our front door and into someone else’s. …”…

theconverstaion.com 3-2021 Why corporate climate pledges of ‘net-zero’ emissions should trigger a healthy dose of skepticism

“Hundreds of companies, including major emitters like United Airlines, BP and Shell, have pledged to reduce their impact on climate change and reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. These plans sound ambitious, but what does it actually take to reach net-zero and, more importantly, will it be enough to slow climate change?

As environmental policy and economics researchers, we study how companies make these net-zero pledges. Though the pledges make great press releases, net-zero is more complicated and potentially problematic than it may seem…”…

nbcnews.com 12-2021 Corporations are turning to forest credits in the race to go ‘carbon-neutral.’ Advocates worry about ‘greenwashing.’ – Environmental groups warn the system doesn’t deliver the carbon reductions promised but offers companies a way to avoid the tougher work of actually cutting emissions – by Josh Lederman

…”…Demand for forest credits is set to explode in the coming years as image-conscious corporations race to go “net zero.” Climate finance consultants and environmental groups are sounding the alarm about a system they say doesn’t deliver anywhere near the carbon reductions promised but offers companies a convenient way to avoid the tougher work of actually cutting emissions. “It is the next big thing in greenwashing — and we must not be fooled,” Greenpeace recently declared on its blog. …”…

interestingengineering.com 31-1-22 Shell’s Carbon Capture Plant Creates More Emissions Than It Captures – Surprise, surprise – by Derya Ozdemir

Oil giant Shell’s Quest plant has been designed to capture carbon emissions from oil sands operations and store them underground to reduce carbon emissions. However, according to a recent study by the human rights organization Global Witness, the facility actually emits more greenhouse gas emissions than it captures

irishtimes.com 13-1-2022 Green’ nuclear power or greenwashing? by ÉAMON Ó CIOSÁIN,

“Sir, – The current heave by the nuclear lobby and certain member states to have nuclear power approved as somehow environmentally positive by the EU is an audacious piece of greenwashing. In terms of moving toward a new energy economy, nuclear power cannot be viewed as transitional given that the timescale from construction to storing of waste stretches to thousands of years. Recent letter writers to your columns have sidestepped this issue, as well as avoiding mention of disasters such as Fukushima (still ongoing) and others.

Much is made of the fact that radioactive fuel is not a fossil fuel whereas large-scale use of fossil-based energy is needed for nuclear generator construction. In addition to nuclear and fossil pollution in this industry, there is the dirty issue of mining uranium in some of the poorest and most unstable countries in the world.

There are question marks over two new nuclear reactor prototypes being promoted in present European plans. The French EPR reactors (only two and still in construction) have been bedevilled by endless cracks and soldering problems. The EPR in Finland is now 12 years beyond its deadline and costs have risen from €3 billion to an estimated €12 billion. Small modular reactors (the other prong of the French strategy being lobbied for in Europe) are in their early days and their cost and operational quality are as yet uncertain.

Wind power is often criticised as being unreliable and requiring backup. So is nuclear power. At the time of writing, the four largest reactors in France (among others) are out of service and coal-fired stations are likely to be used so as to avoid winter power cuts. Across Europe, older generators are being closed down, reducing availability. Reliable? “

bloomberg.com 23/11/2021 Deutsche Bank’s Rising Star Has a Rapid Change of Fortune – DWS greenwashing investigations have cast an unwelcome light on Asoka Woehrmann, and on Deutsche’s asset-management ambitions. By Steven Arons , Saijel Kishan Tariq Fancy, Larry Fink, Greta Thunberg

handelsblatt.com 27/10/2021 Greenwashing-Vorwürfe: DWS engagiert Star-Anwältin in den USA – Der Vermögensverwalter legt gute Quartalszahlen vor. Doch die Greenwashing-Vorwürfe stehen weiter im Raum. Derzeit arbeitet ein ganzes Team an einer Lösung. Astrid Dörner, Yasmin Osman, Anke Rezmer

financialpost.com 27/10/2021 Ex-BlackRock executive Tariq Fancy on Larry Fink, Greta Thunberg and why ESG won’t save us – Baby boomers are not in the climate-change fight in the way Greta Thunberg’s generation is – by Gabriel Friedman

….” Q: But during your tenure at BlackRock, lots of investors started to seek out funds or companies that claim to have an Environment Sustainability and Governance or ESG focus. From inside BlackRock, what’s the difference between the message that corporations are sending about ESG and what you think is actually happening?

A: I think the fundamental challenge is that even if corporations want to do that they can’t because the system is structured in a way to maximize profits and very often maximizing profits means doing something that is not good for society, including contributing to climate change. Companies will say that they’re doing stuff — I don’t call them liars. I would say that whatever they’re doing has to serve some purpose of the business and add shareholder value, otherwise, they really wouldn’t be doing it. And if there’s no one telling you and actually validating what it means to be green, or to be sustainable, then you have a race to the bottom where every company and every participant wants to say they are doing it. To the extent that companies can do things on the margin under the guise of ESG, which I think is definitely possible, in some form they probably have been doing that for decades. The problem with ESG, as you could see in the last number of years, is it grows alongside inequality and carbon emissions and all the things that it’s meant to address. So on the margins, I think CEOs can do something and stakeholder capitalism has some relevance, but it’s not something we can rely on for society’s most important challenges. And I’d argue those are inequality and climate change.

… Q: You have said that the U.S, and Europe are starting to look into definitions of green. Are you optimistic that this could mark a sweeping rule change that would help create a market solution?

A: No, I’m not. I think there’s a small problem, and there’s a big problem. The small problem is that many of these funds are mislabelled. They claim to do one thing, but you know, you dig underneath the hood and you know, they’re mislabelled, or they’re playing fast and loose. But that’s the minor problem.

The major problem is that even if they’re labelled correctly, they don’t have any real world impact. For me to create real world impacts . It’s about regulating the real economy. Put it this way, if you want less carbon emissions, you’d be better off going and putting a carbon tax on all the actual emitters of carbon. If you make an underlying business activity less profitable, less capital will flow there…”…

oilprice.com 3/2021 Big Oil Clashes Over Fossil Fuel Future By Charles Kennedy – Executives from major oil companies clashed over the prospects of oil and gas for the future at the first virtual edition of the CERAWeek conference in Houston.

While BP’s Bernard Looney and Shell’s Ben van Beurden boasted about their shift away from their core business and into renewable energy, Baker Hughes, Hess Corp., and Spain’s Repsol were among those believing that fossil fuels have yet to leave the scene for good, the Houston Chronicle’s Paul Takahashi reports.

theguardian.com 3/2021 Oil firms knew decades ago fossil fuels posed grave health risks, files reveal
Exclusive: documents seen by Guardian show companies fought clean-air rules despite being aware of harm caused by air pollution

The oil industry knew at least 50 years ago that air pollution from burning fossil fuels posed serious risks to human health, only to spend decades aggressively lobbying against clean air regulations, a trove of internal documents seen by the Guardian reveal. The documents, which include internal memos and reports, show the industry was long aware that it created large amounts of air pollution, that pollutants could lodge deep in the lungs and be “real villains in health effects”, and even that its own workers may be experiencing birth defects among their children.

But these concerns did little to stop oil and gas companies, and their proxies, spreading doubt about the growing body of science linking the burning of fossil fuels to an array of health problems that kill millions of people around the world each year. Echoing the fossil-fuel industry’s history of undermining of climate science, oil and gas interests released a torrent of material aimed at raising uncertainty over the harm caused by air pollution and used this to deter US lawmakers from placing further limits on pollutants.

theguardian.com/ 6/4/2021 Banks pledge to fight climate crisis – but their boards have deep links with fossil fuels – Analysis finds 77% of directors on boards of seven US banks have ties to ‘climate-conflicted’ groups, as banks continue to finance projects like the Line 3 oil pipeline

ft.com/ 8/2020 – ESG investing updates robert.armstrong@ft.com

Good morning. Those of you who have read too many of my anti-ESG screeds already may want to skip this letter. But I have no plans to shut up on this topic. We’ve got big global problems. I am a capitalist red in tooth and claw, but I just can’t see how financial markets have a meaningful part to play in solving these problems until citizens and governments act first and decisively.

Tariq Fancy is right about the ESG investment industry. Almost everything that Tariq Fancy says about environmental, social and corporate governance, or ESG, investing has been said before, in one form or another. The significance of what he writes — most recently in a long essay on Medium — is how he says it and who he is. He was the chief investment officer for sustainable investing at BlackRock, which is the most important institutional face of the claim that ESG investing has an important role to play in helping the environment, promoting the social good, holding the corporate world accountable, and so on. Fancy thinks the ESG project is intellectually bankrupt and is damaging to the most important causes it purports to support. I think this too (at least the “E” and “S” parts; there may be hope for “G”), but it means a lot more coming from him, and he does not hold back. He says BlackRock’s position on global warming is analogous to the National Rifle Association’s on US gun deaths:

In my role at BlackRock, I was helping to popularise an idea that the answer to a sustainable future runs through ESG and sustainability and green products, or in other words, that the answer to the market’s failure to serve the long-term public interest is, of course, more market. A bit like the NRA’s traditional answer to mass shootings and related concerns around public safety — the answer is more guns. He says, furthermore, that the senior executives he used to work with are way too smart to believe their own claims about ESG: They must know that they’re exaggerating the degree of overlap between purpose and profit . . . These leaders must know that there is no way the set of ideas they’ve proposed are even close to being up to the challenge of solving the runaway long-term problems . . . And right now all of the other stuff they’re saying — the marketing gobbledegook — is actively misleading people. I urge you to read Fancy’s essay, which is full of powerful and darkly funny anecdotes about high finance. But because he touches on so many of the key arguments against the ESG industrial complex, it’s a good excuse to lay them out.

Argument one. The only really coherent case for ESG investing changing the world is that it raises the cost of capital for “bad” companies (however you or your fund manager want to define “bad”), which means they have incrementally less financing to do bad stuff. But this argument does not get much airtime from investment companies, because it does not sell high-fee financial products. It is too technical and cuts directly against the idea that ESG investors will make superior returns, in addition to doing good. When Fancy made the cost of capital argument to another BlackRock exec about a low-carbon fund, here’s what happened: “But didn’t you see the talking points?” insisted [the exec], referring to a set of oversimplified bullet points I had not seen arrive in my inbox of overflowing and unread emails the day before. They made clear their view: the key to selling the product was to keep it simple, even if that meant glossing over how it directly contributed to fighting climate change.

Argument two. If ESG investing did provide higher returns — as the industry both explicitly and implicitly promises — then profit-seeking investment managers would be doing all the work for us, and we wouldn’t have to be having this damn conversation in the first place. In one chat with a portfolio manager of stocks, I noticed that his subtle dismissal of the latest research declaring ESG-data-is a-godsend! had a “thou doth protest too much” air to it. It wasn’t hard to guess why . . . The portfolio manager’s view was that they’re already focused on performance since it usually determines their compensation, so if ESG information was truly useful they’d use it without being asked

Argument three. There is no good reason to think that the investment horizon of companies and investors should approximate the timescales of the big collective problems we face. For this and other reasons, the overlap between purpose and profit is small. Most of what the ESG cheerleaders [at BlackRock] wanted to believe should matter for portfolio managers did not matter in reality. It was no one’s fault: the reality is that much of what matters to society simply doesn’t affect the returns of a particular investment strategy. Often this is because of the timeline of the underlying investment: many strategies have a very short time horizon, meaning that longer-term ESG issues aren’t particularly relevant.

Argument four. The core mechanism of ESG investing is divestment, but when an investor sells a security in the secondary market, another buys. All the ESG selling may drive down the price at which the buyers buy, giving them an opportunity for juicy returns as the price recovers. There’s a difference between excusing yourself of something you do not wish to partake in and actively fighting against something you think needs to stop for everyone’s sake. Divestment, which often seems to get confused with boycotts, has no clear real-world impact since 10 per cent of the market not buying your stock is not the same as 10 per cent of your customers not buying your product . . . The first likely makes no difference at all since others will happily own it and will bid it up to fair value in the process.

Argument five. Giving people the dumb idea that shifting their savings from one investment fund to another is going to help materially with, say, climate change creates a dangerous distraction from solutions that fit the scale of the problem, all of which involve changing the rules of capitalism through regulation. Working with academics and a polling firm, Fancy polled 3,000 people, showing them headlines about ESG risks in the financial system, and asked respondents whether the headlines described an idea useful in the fight against climate change. One headline was about efforts to protect portfolios from climate risk. I suspected that every time people read the latest such headline about guarding against climate change-related risks in the financial system, they mistakenly believed that these efforts were helpful in the fight against climate change itself. In fact, the survey found that not only was that true, but that most people think that this kind of work is just as helpful as any other pledge, such as large-scale organisational commitments to become net zero carbon emitters. Unfortunately, protecting an investment portfolio from the disastrous effects of climate change is not the same thing as preventing those disastrous effects from occurring in the first place.

Argument six. Green bonds open the way for a neat little capital arbitrage by companies and governments. It’s not totally clear if [green bonds] create much positive environmental impact . . . since most companies have a few qualifying green initiatives that they can raise green bonds to specifically fund while not increasing or altering their overall plans. And nothing stops them from pursuing decidedly non-green activities with their other sources of funding.

Argument seven. To really change the relative financial calculus for “bad” versus “good” companies, ESG funds would have to be orders of magnitude bigger than they are now. They are not going to get big enough. [Is] a $2bn fund enough to make a difference if the majority of the global economy, with nearly $6tn in private equity alone and some $360tn of global wealth overall (3,000 times and 180,000 times larger, respectively), continue operating business as usual?

Argument eight. Corporations, and the whole legal and social apparatus in which they sit, were built around the idea that companies exist to maximise shareholder wealth. That’s what they are designed to do and are required to do. Thinking that fiddling around in the financial markets is going to make companies fit for a radically different purpose — helping with broad social problems driven by economic externalities and tricky collective action problems — is simply bonkers. From top to bottom, from CEO compensation to divisional budgeting and P&L to managerial targets, structures and incentives, we’ve built private firms from the ground up to do one thing really well: extract profits . . . The vast majority of large US companies are incorporated in Delaware, which is perceived as shareholder-friendly and where the courts have been clear that a corporation’s reason for existence is to serve shareholders . . . The foundation of capitalism is strict adherence to fiduciary obligation . . . This adherence to fiduciary obligation “gives credibility to capitalism by addressing the agency cost risk of entrusting money to others”.

Argument nine. Do you really want financial industry bigwigs making choices about how to solve our biggest social problems? Fancy quotes one of the signatories to the hilariously empty and meaningless 2019 Business Roundtable statement on the purpose of the corporation: “There were times that I felt like Thomas Jefferson.” So said Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky, who led the drafting of the BRT’s groundbreaking statement on stakeholder value. It’s easy to understand why he felt that way, given the weight of such lofty words about the future direction of not just business, but indeed society in general. But not enough people have asked a simple question: does it make sense that a CEO should feel like a famous US president? Only one of them is elected by the people

I myself find argument five particularly important. From what I understand, it’s clear we need, for example, a whopping big carbon tax, and soon, or we’re cooked. But we have some of the smartest, most powerful people in the corporate world rattling on about this sustainable investing drivel instead. It scares me.

forbes.com 2-2020 Inside China’s ‘Greenwashing’ Of The Belt And Road – by Wade Shepard

…”…Three decades of rampant development and urbanization in China has taken a heavy toll on the environment. The air quality became some of the worst in the world, much of the water was unfit for drinking and swaths of otherwise arable soil became contaminated.

By the mid-2010s, China saw the writing on the wall and began an all-out, top-down initiative against pollution, which saw coal plants being phased out in exchange for renewable energy resources, big fines for excessive polluters and mass efforts to greenify and increase the ecological sustainability of cities throughout the country. However, as China has made commendable strides towards cleaning up the environment in their own backyard, they are exporting dirty energy sources and polluting industries to other countries all along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), repeating many of the same mistakes they’ve already made at home…”…

biffa.co.uk/sustainability Biffa’s sustainability strategy : In March 2020 we published our sustainability strategy ‘Resourceful, Responsible’ setting out goals for 2030 that are focussed on three core areas aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) : Building a circular economy -Tackling climate change – Caring for our people

theguardian 30/7/2021 UK waste firm Biffa was fined £1.5m for exporting filthy rubbish marked as waste paper for recycling in India and Indonesia in breach of ban by Diane Taylor

…” Biffa said the prosecution brought by the Environment Agency had not been in the public interest. However, after Friday’s sentence, it removed that statement from its website. Instead Biffa told the Guardian: “We take our responsibility for environmental stewardship very seriously and we accept the court’s judgment. We no longer export waste paper outside the OECD and will carefully review our processes to ensure they fully meet the implications of this judgment.”

Judge Shane Collery QC told Wood Green crown court Biffa had shown no contrition. He found the company’s previous comments about being picked on by the Environment Agency and no public interest served in being prosecuted a second time as “aggravating and unattractive”.

The Environment Agency brought the prosecution against Biffa after uncovering rolling contracts to send vast amounts of waste to India and Indonesia.

Malcolm Lythgo, the head of waste regulation at the Environment Agency, said: “Biffa shipped banned materials to developing countries without having systems in place to prevent the offences. The Environment Agency will pursue those who blight the lives of overseas communities through illegal exports. This guilty verdict underlines that anyone producing or handling waste must only export material legally and safely for recycling.

“The Environment Agency stopped the illegal export of almost 23,000 tonnes of unsuitable waste in 2019-20. We have stepped up increased monitoring of international waste shipments.”

During the most recent trial, jurors were told of Biffa’s rolling monthly contracts worth a combined £39,500 to move the household waste to India or Indonesia. The company was convicted of four breaches of regulation 23 of the Transfrontier Shipment of Waste Regulations 2007 between October 2018 and April 2019. In addition to the £1.5m fine, Biffa was ordered to pay costs of £153,827.99, and a proceeds of crime order of £38,388. In September 2019, Biffa was fined £350,000, with costs of £240,000 and a proceeds of crime order of £9,912, for sending household waste, described as waste paper, to China between May and June 2015. …

The Biffa group has a turnover of more than £1bn, and about 100,000 tonnes of waste is exported from its Edmonton site.”…

thetimes.co.uk 6/7/2021 Liontrust flop is a warning the ESG blancmange is starting to wobble
Patrick Hosking
“Investment houses have grown accustomed to one certainty in recent years. Label a fund “sustainable” or “responsible” or give it an “impact investment” badge and, hey presto, the money from end investors floods in. People want to feel they are doing their bit, whether helping to combat planet warming or slave labour. According to the Investment Association, retail purchases of funds it defines as sustainable have been running at about £3 billion a quarter since the pandemic started.”…

blackincbooks.com. 2012 Greenwash by Guy Pearse – “Greenwashing is when a company or organization spends more time and money on marketing themselves as environmentally friendly than on minimizing their environmental impact. It is a deceitful advertising gimmick intended to mislead consumers who prefer to buy goods and services from environmentally conscious brands.”

researchgate.net – read or download 2016 Greenwash book review by Robin Canniford – “…most claims to eco-friendliness and carbon neutrality fail to wash.”

economist.com 22/5/2021 Hot air – Sustainable finance is rife with greenwash. Time for more disclosure – Supposedly green and cuddly funds are stuffed full of polluters and sin stocks

…” A better system would force companies to reveal their full carbon footprint, including emissions from the products they sell and the goods and services they buy. It would help if big polluters also revealed how they expect their footprint to change and the amount of capital expenditure that goes toward low-carbon investments. That way an investor could work out how much pollution their portfolio is responsible for today and how it might look tomorrow.

The results of such disclosure may come as a surprise. We estimate that listed firms that are not state-controlled account for only 14-32% of the world’s emissions—so green investing can be only part of the answer. About 5% of these firms account for over 80% of the total emissions. They are mostly oil producers, utilities, cement firms and mining companies. Better disclosure would also show that only a tiny number of firms are investing heavily in renewable energy or breakthrough technologies.

The combined effect would be to expose as bunk the idea that swathes of the corporate world and asset-management industry are planet-saving heroes. And it would help investors put their money into truly green firms, ensuring a better allocation of capital and a faster energy transition.”

financialpost.com 7/5/2021 Here’s why the former head of sustainable investing at BlackRock says don’t believe the ESG marketing hype – Tariq Fancy says ESG detracts from real efforts to address climate change by Gabriel Friedman

responsible-investor.com 2/2021 Much of what is liberally classified as “sustainable investment” lacks substance. Simple screens and the token consideration of ESG factors in the investment process generate few, if any, real-world benefits for people and planet. Much of the $17trn in sustainable investing is in fact a security-level activity – by James Purcell

bbc.co.uk 22/4/2021 Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk agree on bitcoin’s green credentials – Tesla chief Elon Musk has agreed with Twitter boss Jack Dorsey, who has said that bitcoin “incentivises” renewable energy, despite experts warning otherwise. The cyrptocurrency’s carbon footprint is as large of some of the world’s biggest cities, studies suggest. But Mr Dorsey claims that could change if bitcoin miners worked hand-in-hand with renewable energy firms. One expert said it was a “cynical attempt to greenwash” bitcoin.

China, where more than two-thirds of power is from coal, accounts for more than 75% of bitcoin mining around the world.